Syrian President’s Expected Return to Highlight Arab League Summit

The president of Syria will attend the Arab League summit on Friday for the first time in almost a decade in Jeddah, a Saudi vacation town on the Red Sea. Major discussion points for the summit are anticipated to be the crises in Sudan and Syria.

Arab leaders started arriving in Jeddah on Thursday in preparation for the 32nd annual Arab summit, which Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman will host on Friday.

Bashar al-Assad, the president of Syria, is anticipated to attend. He hasn’t been to an Arab League summit since 2010, the year before the start of the Syrian civil war.

At a conference in Cairo earlier this month, the Arab League’s foreign ministers reinstated Syria’s membership in the organization.

Syria is an important member of the Arab League, according to Syrian Foreign Minister Faisal al-Miqdad, who spoke to journalists in Jeddah on Wednesday.

He stated that Syria supports any Arab attempts to end the situation there and that Damascus must attend any summit meetings of the Arab League.

Hossam Zaki, the deputy head of the Arab League, said that the meeting on Friday would include the repatriation of Syrian refugees and the reconstruction of Syria. But considering the sanctions that Western nations have imposed on Damascus, he claimed that the latter subject was “not an easy issue to resolve.”

In addition, Zaki stated that the 2002 Arab peace effort with Israel “remains unchanged from its original formulation.”

In remarks on Wednesday, Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal Bin Farhan hailed Syria’s return to the Arab League and said that Syria’s involvement in Arab decision-making will be a crucial element in moving forward with the resolution of many difficult problems.

He asserted that the globe is currently faced with severe issues and threats, and that it is crucial for Arab states to come together to jointly confront these issues and take more steps to cooperate to ensure the safety and security of the area.

The conference will highlight both the Saudi crown prince and the Syrian president, according to Khattar Abou Diab, a political science professor at the University of Paris, who spoke to VOA.

He claimed that Assad is more of a divider, whereas this year’s summit is intended to affirm Mohammed Bin Salman’s status as the region’s leader and demonstrate his capacity to bring Arab leaders together symbolically or colorfully.

Abou Diab also mentioned that the summit will end with a demand for Syria to accept political refugees and put a stop to the smuggling of drugs from its territory to other Arab governments in exchange for financial support from the Arab world.

The war in Sudan is also on the agenda of Friday’s summit, according to Ahmed Aboul Gheit, the head of the Arab League, who also noted that Arab leaders’ top priority is to restore some sort of peace to the nation.

According to him, Sudan is a crucial Arab nation, and the terrible way in which a military conflict has broken out in Sudan’s towns and streets has hurt the hearts of most Arabs. The summit will work to bring peace back to the nation so that political discourse may continue.

Recently, conflicting parties in the Sudan have been holding peace negotiations in Jeddah under the sponsorship of Saudi Arabia, but there hasn’t been any sign of progress.